ABSTRACT WIAI is a new philanthropic effort by the Wadhwani brothers, Romesh Wadhwani and Sunil Wadhwani, entrepreneurs of Indian origin living in the US. Our mission is to do research in AI, ML, Data Science and related areas that will address societal challenges in a variety of domains including (but not limited to) Education, Health, Infrastructure, and Agriculture. We plan to build a strong team of researchers dedicated to this mission and also work with a variety of partners – from Academia, NGOS, Government and International Agencies, Industry and others. We plan to take an approach that is strongly driven by societal use cases keeping in mind the feasibility of deployment at scale as the ultimate measure of impact.

BIO P. Anandan has recently joined the newly formed Wadhwani Institute of Artificial Intelligence as its CEO. Previous to this Anandan was VP for Research at the Adobe Research Lab India (2016-2017) and before that a Distinguished Scientist and Managing Director at Microsoft Research (1997-2014). Anandan was the founding director of Microsoft Research India which he ran from 2005-2014. Prior to this, Anandan was researcher at Sarnoff corporation (1991-1997) and an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Yale University (1987-1991). His primary research area is Computer vision where he is well known for his fundamental and lasting contributions to the problem of visual motion analysis.

Anandan received his PhD in Computer Science from University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1987, a Masters in Computer Science from University of Nebraska, Lincoln in 1979 and his BTech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras, India in 1977. He is a distinguished alumnus of IIT Madras, and UMass, Amherst and is on the Nebraska Hall of Computing.